Vatican targeted by terror cell
Italians discover plot for ‘big jihad’
ROME — Italian authorities arrested nine people Friday and said they were part of an al-Qaida-linked terrorist cell based on the island of Sardinia that the police have been watching for years.
The group plotted attacks in Pakistan, and at one point planned to strike the Vatican, as part of a “big [violent] jihad in Italy,” one police official said. Another nine suspects were still being sought.
Wiretaps collected over seven years of active investigation found “signals of some preparation for a possible attack” at the Vatican in March 2010, Mauro Mura, chief prosecutor of Cagliari, Sardinia, told reporters Friday. Those wiretaps revealed the presence in Rome of a Pakistani man “described as a kamikaze,”Mr. Mura said, meaning someone who “was destined for martyrdom.”
Mr. Mura said the planned attack was not necessarily aimed at the pope of the time, Benedict XVI, but rather at the throngs of tourists and pilgrims who fill St. Peter’s Square twice a week to hear the pope speak.
“Kamikaze, crowded place, these are the clues,” he said.
The attack was never carried out, possibly because the suspects learned that police were on their trail. Mr. Mura said Friday that “our activity was indispensable to ensure that the irreparable did not happen.”
Investigators painted the Vatican plot as one element in a wide-ranging investigation that centered mostly on several prominent members of the Pakistani community in Italy. One suspect was described as a leader of the Muslim community in the Sardinian town of Olbia; another was said to be a wellknown imam in Lombardy.
Italian authorities began their investigation in 2005, in the wake of suicide bombing attacks in London that raised concerns across Europe. Some of the suspects in the case had direct contacts with Osama bin Laden before he was killed in 2011, authorities said.
But the investigation wound down after 2012, when the suspects “desisted from further activity” and became “more prudent and less active,” because they discovered they were under surveillance, Mr. Mura said.
Prosecutors then spent more than two years quietly building what they hoped would be an airtight case.
None of the nine suspects arrested Friday was charged with involvement in the Vatican plot because there was too little direct evidence, officials said.
The Vatican played down the news of the 2010 plot on Friday. Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, said Benedict XVI and his successor, Pope Francis, continued to meet freely with members of the public.